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Just an observation about another problem with current matchmaking. I like battleships but quit playing them as a rule and went to cruisers a while back, and now I remember why. Decided to grind my Queen Elizabeth since I have a perm camo for the Monarch in my inventory. Played a match where I was bottom tier but since I play co-op, it really does not matter except for one tiny thing. The maps are huge. I went full speed straight for a cap in front of me, got to fire my guns 3 times, cap was taken before I got there, and match was over a few minutes later. Talked about a similar problem a long while back in the Texas where I could not even get to the cap in front of me before the match was over and got to fire my guns once.

Since Wargaming sees little need in addressing matchmaking, I just would offer a warning to co-op players who want to spend money on mid tier battleships.. Don't. It can be a miserable experience and your money will be wasted. When you are top tier and the maps smaller, everything is just fine. When you are bottom tier you will struggle just to get into the fight and find yourself at the bottom of the scoreboard more often than not. Most definitely play the tech tree BBs but do not spend any money on the premium ships unless you want to find yourself in games where you spend your time just sailing around and not getting to shoot at anything.

Despite all ships types being balanced so that DDs can 1v1 BBs and CAs and 1v1 CVs, ect - the point differences between ships on the score board don't make sense what so ever. A DD can ram your BB and win it for the team. You can be a low tier BB and still be worth just as much point.

You can literally hold an entire flank yourself but not get the same EXP as the guy who runs in and recaps the cap you were pushing the team out of despite tanking over 2.5 million damage and going over 100k on four opponents in solo.

To say that this game makes any sense at all is pretty off base. I mean... they cannot even figure out how to do CVs right despite over 25 years of recent gaming employing Carrier/Parasite unit types just fine.

War Gaming is just... meh... at times. You just gotta' swallow it and push through or move onto something else like you did.

I agree wholeheartedly. I have been there too many times. I play my QE in ops mostly. Texas just sits. Too bad since I really like that old tub.

I really enjoy the battleships too, they can be such fun when and if you can get into the fight. The New York is a personal favorite, such a fun ship and was one of the first tech tree ships I bought a permanent camo for. Other than the Snowflake event, have not played her because many matches are just a painful experience of just sailing towards the fight. I have to think that Wargaming just didn't care enough about the whole game experience for the players. I say if you want to do the +2/-2, fine, just make it on the smaller maps so you won't ruin the game for the low tier ships more than it is by fighting far superior ships. Force the top tier ships to have maneuver and fight the close in fight, especially in PvP play. If you plan on crapping on players, lets crap on all of them.

I'm personally okay with this system, but +1/-1 tier matchmaking could work better, especially when tier boundaries for certain maps have expanded. Recently, I played on North with Bayern. Lots of sailing.

I'm personally okay with this system, but +1/-1 tier matchmaking could work better, especially when tier boundaries for certain maps have expanded. Recently, I played on North with Bayern. Lots of sailing.

Now that I ponder it, there is zero reason to have anything but +1/-1 in co-op. There are plenty of players and for those times you are short humans, the game can fill it with bots.... Leave +2/-2 alone for PvP since it is so popular.

Now that I ponder it, there is zero reason to have anything but +1/-1 in co-op. There are plenty of players and for those times you are short humans, the game can fill it with bots.... Leave +2/-2 alone for PvP since it is so popular.

That reminds me of a replay Lord_Zath reviewed where a Charles Martel dominated a T10 match.

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with them throwing the CV rework, still in test mode, onto the live servers. I see no reason why they can't "test" +1/-1 MM on the live servers. I mean usually I wait like 15 to 30 secs for a game, I am willing to wait longer.

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While we dont have any kind of skill based MM, skill > tier, simple as that, changing the MM for +1/-1 wont change that.

Also, the MM only works with the ships that you have in qeue. Changing the MM to +1/-1 wont change that either, some tiers are still going to be botton tier more often, in fact, you might make it even worse considering that the MM will have less ships to work with.

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The only huge side effect of +/-2 is radar.... A tier 7 radar cruiser in a tier 5 match out right sucks....

The BB speed issue is a real issues......... I'm not sure +/- 1 would make all that amount of difference because the DD's are at the CAP in COOP killing 2 or 3 ships well before you main guns are effective.... Tier 7 is the lowest that I've experienced "reasonable" BB grinding.... Heck, I get frustrated in random matches when my clan mates bring out those slow BB's with their crawling speeds and slow reloads........some support eh?!

I got the Texas for joining the game last year and tried in in COOP and random battles and SOLD IT.............Oh God, how do people play those ships....

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Just an observation about another problem with current matchmaking. I like battleships but quit playing them as a rule and went to cruisers a while back, and now I remember why. Decided to grind my Queen Elizabeth since I have a perm camo for the Monarch in my inventory. Played a match where I was bottom tier but since I play co-op, it really does not matter except for one tiny thing. The maps are huge. I went full speed straight for a cap in front of me, got to fire my guns 3 times, cap was taken before I got there, and match was over a few minutes later. Talked about a similar problem a long while back in the Texas where I could not even get to the cap in front of me before the match was over and got to fire my guns once.

Since Wargaming sees little need in addressing matchmaking, I just would offer a warning to co-op players who want to spend money on mid tier battleships.. Don't. It can be a miserable experience and your money will be wasted. When you are top tier and the maps smaller, everything is just fine. When you are bottom tier you will struggle just to get into the fight and find yourself at the bottom of the scoreboard more often than not. Most definitely play the tech tree BBs but do not spend any money on the premium ships unless you want to find yourself in games where you spend your time just sailing around and not getting to shoot at anything.

Taylor, the MM tier spread isn't the problem. The real problem is the devs' refusal to rework mid tier USN BBs in light of the fact that they've given nearly every new BB line ahistorically buffed speeds, with the tier 6 and 7 French BBs being the most extreme cases. Those 2 BBs should have speeds around 20 kts, IIRC, but were given fictional engine upgrade refits that give them ridiculously good speeds. On the flip side, the tier 5 through 7 USN BBs are stuck with their fully upgraded speeds being their historical speed of 21 kts.

What needs to happen is for the tier 5 through 7 USN BBs to have their stock speed be their current best speed of 21 kts, and then give them a fictional engine upgrade that bumps their top speed up into the mid 20's. I don't care how unrealistic some may think this is. I'll throw the same line at those charges that, frankly, wrongly gets thrown at me. "It's an arcade game." Make these mid tier USN BBs have more competitive top speeds and much of the speed problem you address will go away.

On another note, it's also not a MM problem that you're not able to reach a cap in a slow BB before the battle ends in coop. It's just the nature of coop, that many battles end rather quickly if the DD and cruiser players are pretty decent, because they'll get to the fight first. And if they do well, they'll blow away the enemy before the slower BBs can get there. The reality is that this happens fairly often on some moderately sized maps as well, like Trident. From my perspective, it's a problem with coop and its smaller teams, plus the fact that coop bots are pretty dumb. You sometimes get battles where the enemy bots get blown away before the BBs can get close to the fight, and you do only get in a volley or two, if your guns have the range.

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The only huge side effect of +/-2 is radar.... A tier 7 radar cruiser in a tier 5 match out right sucks....

The BB speed issue is a real issues......... I'm not sure +/- 1 would make all that amount of difference because the DD's are at the CAP in COOP killing 2 or 3 ships well before you main guns are effective.... Tier 7 is the lowest that I've experienced "reasonable" BB grinding.... Heck, I get frustrated in random matches when my clan mates bring out those slow BB's with their crawling speeds and slow reloads........some support eh?!

I got the Texas for joining the game last year and tried in in COOP and random battles and SOLD IT.............Oh God, how do people play those ships....

Asym, this really seems to be a problem in randoms. I can't remember the last time I saw a coop bot ship that mounted radar actually USE IT.

As for the Texas, I have no problem playing it. If you mount the range enhancing upgrade module on it, the Texas has very good range for a tier 5 BB. Is it slow? Sure. But being able to play slow ships is all about having patience, not about whether the ships are good or not. And apparently you have no patience. Some people do have it, some people don't.

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With the USN battleships tier 3-7 and to a lesser extent the low tier RN and Germans it requires thinking ahead and sometimes a bit of luck. Yeah...they’re slow as molasses. You have to pick the spot you want to be and stick with that plan. The luck comes from having enemies to shoot at when you get there. Being wishy-washy and changing your mind will cause you to never get into the fight because those things are slow to begin with, don’t accelerate well, and turns bleed off their speed quickly. So in random you need to pick a side and stick with it....sometimes the enemy lemmings the other way and you don’t get into the fight. Co-op is even easier....bots don’t have strategy. They just go full speed straight forward until they see something. Do the same and you’ll have something to shoot soon enough.

My only issue with the current +/- 2 is when the top tier ships far outnumber the bottom tier ships. When the number of bottom tier ships at least equal the number of top tier ships things are fine but when they don't it simply stinks. Once side effect of the recent change to tier 8/9 matchmaking is that while there are more matches where tier 8 or 9 are top tier and outnumber the tier 10's is that when a tier 8/9 is dragged into a tier 10 match they are going to be greatly outnumbered. Because of the large number of tier 10's in the que it is ironic that the WoT MM would actually work really good, better than it does there for our 8 - 10.

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My only issue with the current +/- 2 is when the top tier ships far outnumber the bottom tier ships. When the number of bottom tier ships at least equal the number of top tier ships things are fine but when they don't it simply stinks. Once side effect of the recent change to tier 8/9 matchmaking is that while there are more matches where tier 8 or 9 are top tier and outnumber the tier 10's is that when a tier 8/9 is dragged into a tier 10 match they are going to be greatly outnumbered. Because of the large number of tier 10's in the que it is ironic that the WoT MM would actually work really good, better than it does there for our 8 - 10.

Brush, and then there's the flip side to this. In WoT, they changed their MM so that in a normal 3 tier spread battle, there should be only 3 tier 10's, 5 tier 9's and 7 tier 8's. You'd think that this would make people in tier 8's a lot happier, knowing that they'll never be greatly outnumbered by the tier 10's. But NOOOOOOO.... They complain about this MM model as well! I suspect that there are a bunch of people who will never be happy until MM is +/-0 tiers, and would loudly complain if they were hung with a golden rope!

Brush, and then there's the flip side to this. In WoT, they changed their MM so that in a normal 3 tier spread battle, there should be only 3 tier 10's, 5 tier 9's and 7 tier 8's. You'd think that this would make people in tier 8's a lot happier, knowing that they'll never be greatly outnumbered by the tier 10's. But NOOOOOOO.... They complain about this MM model as well! I suspect that there are a bunch of people who will never be happy until MM is +/-0 tiers, and would loudly complain if they were hung with a golden rope!

I have only played a few matches over there since it was put in and then only low tiers so maybe I should pull out a higher tier tank and see what all the hullabaloo is all about. However, I have heard that their system is forcing tier 10 matches and not making tier 8/9 matches because of the 3/5/7 rule.

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WoT is a bit different though, as armor penetration between tiers is a struggle, sometimes even with premium ammo, and it's also a credit sink to constantly play in T10, even if you have decent matches. T10 in WoWS doesn't require one to farm for credits in lower tiers to be able to afford to play it, and with the faster tier progression in WoWS, once a player hits T10 they don't have the incentive to play lower tiers, so there is a higher percentage playing upper tiers in WOWS. I'm just starting out in WoT and even playing in the lower tiers I'm running into lots of players that have thousands and tens of thousands of matches under their belt, which makes it hard for new players starting out. Here we would call that seal clubbing, but over there it's an unfortunate byproduct of the economy.

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I have only played a few matches over there since it was put in and then only low tiers so maybe I should pull out a higher tier tank and see what all the hullabaloo is all about. However, I have heard that their system is forcing tier 10 matches and not making tier 8/9 matches because of the 3/5/7 rule.

Brush, I think that what happens is this.

MM looks at the queue and has to make a decision. Are there enough tier 10's in queue to create a Grand Battle (i.e. 30 T10 tanks per team, IIRC)? If not, are there enough to create an all tier 10 battle, i.e. 15 tier 10 tanks per team? If not, are there enough T9's and T10's, to create a tier 9 and T10 battle, where the split is, IIRC, something like 6/9 or 7/8 or 5/10 tier 10/tier 9 tanks? And if not, are there enough tier 10, 9, and 8 tanks to build 2 teams that are split 3/5/7? I might be wrong about the order of those checks within the WoT MM algorithm, but those are the options.

I think that one of the gripes is that tier 8's are more often bottom tier in T10 battles than they are top tier. And even if the MM queue was perfectly balanced with the exact same number of tanks at each tier, clearly you'd need more tier 8's for tier 10 battles, i.e. 7 on a team of 15, than you'd need in tier 8 battles, where you'd only need 3 t8's per team. However, it would seem that those teams are pretty fair in their splits by tier.

Frankly, I don't think that it's mathematically possible to end up with a tier 8 tank being able to be top tier more often than it's bottom tier with this MM model. At the same time, it seems a lot more fair than an MM model where you may be a tier 8 in a tier 10 battle and you're grossly outnumbered by higher tier tanks. And even if you had a situation where T8 tanks were top tier more often than bottom tier, I'd fully expect that the players of tier 6 tanks would be exceptionally unhappy about their state of affairs.

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WoT is a bit different though, as armor penetration between tiers is a struggle, sometimes even with premium ammo, and it's also a credit sink to constantly play in T10, even if you have decent matches. T10 in WoWS doesn't require one to farm for credits in lower tiers to be able to afford to play it, and with the faster tier progression in WoWS, once a player hits T10 they don't have the incentive to play lower tiers, so there is a higher percentage playing upper tiers in WOWS. I'm just starting out in WoT and even playing in the lower tiers I'm running into lots of players that have thousands and tens of thousands of matches under their belt, which makes it hard for new players starting out. Here we would call that seal clubbing, but over there it's an unfortunate byproduct of the economy.

Oh, over there, they call it seal clubbing too. Trust me, I've played a LOT of WoT, before I switched over to WoWS, with around 33k battles in Tanks. Yes, there are some differences.

1. It's a LOT easier being a tier 8 ship in WoWS in a tier 10 battle than it is being tier 8 tank in a tier 10 battle. About the only tier 8 tanks that seem to be able to hold their own when bottom tier are tank destroyers with big, powerful guns, and arty. If one hasn't played WoT and thinks it's bad here being the tier 8 in a tier 10 battle, ya ain't seen nothing yet!

2. Premium ammo. Yeah, premium ammo in WoT really messes things up, but I'm not sure if WG is willing to do what it takes to remove premium ammo from WoT. Also, some players will use nothing but premium ammo in tier 10 tanks, for the simple reason that they have an enormous credit balance and can afford to do so (and are probably rather good players who have built up that credit balance, or perhaps they're a whale and have purchased a pile of credits).

3. Tier 10 tanks as credit sinks aren't much different from tier 10 ships. If you have a premium account and you're pretty good, you can turn a profit or at least break even.

4. The economy in WoT in general is far less rewarding than in WoWS. I personally love that credits are fairly easy to earn in WoWS. But in WoT, it takes hell and forever to earn credits. And it a big reason why I don't spend more time back in WoT these days.

Taylor, the MM tier spread isn't the problem. The real problem is the devs' refusal to rework mid tier USN BBs in light of the fact that they've given nearly every new BB line ahistorically buffed speeds, with the tier 6 and 7 French BBs being the most extreme cases. Those 2 BBs should have speeds around 20 kts, IIRC, but were given fictional engine upgrade refits that give them ridiculously good speeds. On the flip side, the tier 5 through 7 USN BBs are stuck with their fully upgraded speeds being their historical speed of 21 kts.

What needs to happen is for the tier 5 through 7 USN BBs to have their stock speed be their current best speed of 21 kts, and then give them a fictional engine upgrade that bumps their top speed up into the mid 20's. I don't care how unrealistic some may think this is. I'll throw the same line at those charges that, frankly, wrongly gets thrown at me. "It's an arcade game." Make these mid tier USN BBs have more competitive top speeds and much of the speed problem you address will go away.

On another note, it's also not a MM problem that you're not able to reach a cap in a slow BB before the battle ends in coop. It's just the nature of coop, that many battles end rather quickly if the DD and cruiser players are pretty decent, because they'll get to the fight first. And if they do well, they'll blow away the enemy before the slower BBs can get there. The reality is that this happens fairly often on some moderately sized maps as well, like Trident. From my perspective, it's a problem with coop and its smaller teams, plus the fact that coop bots are pretty dumb. You sometimes get battles where the enemy bots get blown away before the BBs can get close to the fight, and you do only get in a volley or two, if your guns have the range.

Well I disagree that the matchmaking spread isn't a problem but that is for another thread. What I am saying that being low tier on a huge map is. I have plenty of games in co-op, yes I know they often end quickly when the team is good. I am talking about the "normal" game where it takes around 5 minutes to get everything killed off and with the big map, you can not get a BB even into a cap. The big reason I switched to playing cruisers was their speed and decent firepower (I don't care for DDs) so it makes them ideal in co-op play. It is just a shame about the slower BBs though, they are so fun to play if they don't spend the entirety of the game just sailing with nothing to shoot at. With the slower pace of PvP, they probably don't notice this kind of thing since the matches are long, drawn out affairs but in PvE it is just downright awful. The idea of a "speed upgrade" is a nice thought but am doubting that would ever happen.

I doubt they will do anything about this honestly, not even sure they care. What I do want to do is to warn my fellow co-op players about spending real world money on slow battleships because when they end up on the maps designed for higher tiered ships, it is just a miserable gaming experience.

You can get 3 or 4 wins in co-op in the time it takes to do one PvP match that may or may not be a win. Just farming first win bonuses for wins in PvE keeps the mode almost as profitable as playing PvP. Someone did the math a long while back and assuming a 50% win rate in PvP, it will pay out a bit more but not by a whole lot. You add to that the absence of salt, the fun factor and it makes co-op a very appealing place to play the game.